Trump Missed A Valuable Opportunity to Burn Biden and Open Voters’ Eyes, Here’s How
During every debate I’m the person waiting to hear about each candidate’s plan to decarcerate the United States. Unfortunately, there’s never a direct question about improving prison conditions, ending prison slavery or addressing mass incarceration. However, during this second round; moderated by Kristen Welker, television journalist and only the second Black woman to moderate a presidential debate; ‘Race Relations in America’ was the topic of discussion that enveloped these themes.
Biden’s Senate Leadership launched Mass Incarceration
When asked about the way that Black and Brown people experience race in America, Biden expressed his recognition of the existence of institutional racism in America (something that Pence denied during the vice presidential debate). He also expressed his that America has never fully serviced the Black community but what he fails to recognize is how instrumental his role has been in constructing the environment that did not move “the needle further and further to inclusion” as he claims. His political career actually worked to move the location of exclusion from being blatantly evident in the streets to being hidden behind prison walls.
It’s not enough to understand why people of color fear for their children, we need an administration that has experience with reshaping society to better serve those parents and their children and restore hope to our traumatized communities. Biden knows what the problems are; listing all the issues in need of correction including better schools, healthcare, economic opportunity all under the general goal that he describes as “the ability to accumulate wealth as well as to be free from violence”. These are ideals that impassion me, so if I wasn’t familiar with his political history I would be more positioned to empathize with his rhetoric.
Contrastingly, as a result of Biden’s direct work in congress there are hundreds of thousands of Black families locked within the criminal legal structure who are completely restricted from accessing those goals. They can’t accumulate wealth because a potential breadwinner in their family is locked behind bars earning cents to the dollar an hour (if they are event paid at all). These families’ earnings are constantly drained by the legal system in attorneys, court costs, legal fees, pay-by-the-minute phone calls, pay-by-the-message emails, commissary foods, state supervision bills and all of the like. Incarcerated citizens, the vast majority of whom were convicted as a result of Biden’s Bills, live in violent environments as a part of their daily reality. Biden is not our choice.
Trump strategically used the race question as an opportunity to highlight this, recalling in 1994 when Biden “did such crime to the Black community…and called them ‘super predators”. Surprisingly, Biden silently mouthed “not true” even though we’ve all seen the videos of him making these racially targeted, white supremacist statements. In that moment I completely understood the type of trend seeking, career politician that we have in Biden. Biden will go as far as blatantly lying to millions of people worldwide on live television in order to completely minimize his role in the passing of the Crime Bills that have devastated and continue to plague millions of lives.
Kamala stands with him because she’s the exact same, she is acting as puppet to be used in order to make Biden more palatable. Officials saw how eager we were to try to create a historic moment in 2012 by ‘voting Black’ rather than by trying to protect our actual interests. We’re so disorganized as a community that, rather than coordinate on platform stances, we settle for kinfolk and cultural cues, it’s pathetic.
Interestingly, Biden tries to redeem himself reminding voters of his slogan, “Reputation for honor and telling the truth…our character is on the ballot, look at us closely”, but his motto isn’t serving Biden at all and he needs to stop saying it. His reputation works against him completely, and his lies were in full display on the presidential debate stage.
Nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump…
While the cringe worthy statement is the furthest from the truth, Trump is the only president who has passed any form of federal legislation to dramatically reduce the prison population and improve conditions for incarcerated citizens in decades. Trump failed to flaunt his successes in his passing of the First Step Act (FSA), but for folks who are unfamiliar its reforms include
- Expanding the amount of time a prisoner can earn off of their sentence to 54 days/year
- Mandating that people in prison be housed in facilities closer to their primary residence (within 500 driving miles)
- Allowed elderly/terminally ill prisoners to serve the reminder of their sentences in home confinement
- Expanded pre-release custody to inmates who successfully completed recidivism reduction programming
- Prohibited the use of restraints on pregnant women in prison
- Required the BOP to provide free tampons and sanitary napkins to women in prison
- Prohibited the the use of solitary confinement for juvenile Reduced mandatory minimums across the board and capped mandatory life sentences at 25yrs
Most importantly the FSA included a method of oversight that required the BOP to report to Congress on its enactment annually for the next five years. Those who are interested should read the Congressional Research Service’s full overview.
In addition to reforms to the federal prison system, Trump referenced his role in creating opportunity zones in disadvantaged areas and distributing multi-year (10 year!) funding to HBCUs, another task that no president has ever taken. HBCUs have been struggling for decades and many would have closed permanently due to lack funds, especially in the current coronavirus pandemic conditions that’s negatively impacted all colleges and universities nationwide.
Obama and Biden did nothing to advance any type of reforms targeted to serving the Black community. While Biden flaunts the former administration having pardoned over 1,000 sentences vs. Trumps 20 sentences, commutation applications are reviewed on a case by case basis, making passing bills like the FSA much more broadly impactful than having simply approved more commutation applications. The FSA will continue to contribute to reducing prison populations and improving prison conditions as well as inspire ongoing political changes that would continue to allow the reunification of families impacted by mass incarceration for years to come.
“They should be going to rehabilitation not to jail”
Rather than believe that Biden has had some incredible change of heart from his previously strong “tough on crime” stances, we have to recognize that he no more than is a career politician, old dogs don’t learn new tricks. He doesn’t change but his rhetoric adjusts to fit whatever is trending. Presidential candidate Joe Biden, largely wrote the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (Crime Bill) and shepherded it through the legislature as the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When being signed into law, President Bill Clinton saw it as his highest accomplishment. At that time the federal prison population was less than 100,000 and tough-on-crime rhetoric was pushing the combined federal-state prison population number closer and closer to 1 million, but it had not yet reached that point in 1994. The Biden Bill’s passing dramatically accelerated the U.S. pace to become the number one nation on earth in detainment and imprisonment. The following year after the bill went into affect, once states were getting funding to build more prisons and keep them full, the number of incarcerated people in the U.S. increased to over 1.5 million, at no point in human history has this level of imprisonment ever been known.
Now conveniently, Biden believes that there should be no mandatory minimums. He claims to accomplish this as president by offering $20B to states as an incentive to change their laws to eliminate mandatory minimums and set up drug courts. Trump refutes this with his ongoing theme, “But why didn’t he do it 4 years ago?” to which Biden blamed his inability to take action on a Republican congress. This silenced Trump, but as a Republican president he should have been bolstered by the fact that he would have been much less likely to attempt to pass such reforms. Along with this, just like during the Obama/Biden administration, Trump also had to work with a Republican congress in order to pass the FSA, so Biden’s excuse for not getting more reforms through is as empty as his rhetoric.
A Republican president may be the perfect guise for invoking change
If it takes a Republican president to get prison reforms passed, then I can live under a republican for another four years. Trump is right in telling Biden, “You’ve done nothing but the Crime Bill which put tens of thousands of Black men mostly in jail.” It’s almost laughable that more advances have happened for the Black community under the guise of Trump’s racist ignorance than under the charismatic vigor of the Obama/Biden administration. With Biden, who hasn’t at all earned our trust, things will feel better than they actually are. The people will again be pacified by symbolism, rather than ignited by the need for dramatic change.
When asked, why should those families that are still suffering from the impact of the Biden bills vote for Joe? My simple answer is that they shouldn’t. Biden’s response was that it was a bill on how to deal with drugs that he admits was a mistake revealing that his change in heart is due to the fact that “the American people have now seen that this is a mistake”, but the American people never wanted their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, uncles, brothers or sisters to be tossed behind bars for simple drug offenses or handed long harsh sentences for poverty crimes. While Biden now believes that pure drug offenses should be going into treatment “They shouldn’t go to jail for a drug or an alcohol problem, they should be going to treatment,” simple drug crimes do represent a sizable portion of the prison population, but what about the those who were slapped with weapons charges? gang affiliation charges? or distribution charges? What are the solutions to those poverty crimes that are exasperated the increasing poverty problem?
Dare I say many of us trust what has already failed. I’m done choosing the lesser of two evils, I’d rather have blatantly evil with advances than dirty, lying Joe…but I’m not voting for Trump either.
I’m voting for the fly
We need more diversity in the presidential debates in order to have a more robust dialogue and fair election. Third party candidates should be included, some of the more longer standing third parties that have candidates running in 2020 include the Green (Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker) and Libertarian (Jo Jorgensen/Spike Cohen) parties. Adding more views would turn a binary discussion into a more robust debate with a wider range of proposed solutions to the longstanding issues that the Democratic and Republican parties are obviously ill-equipped to resolve as the corporate serving entities that they both are, neither are people’s parties.
A third party vote isn’t a wasted vote. My intention for this post is to fully empower impacted citizens and concerned voters to make the political decision that best serves their interests rather than being forced into a corrupt two-party mindset due to lack of exposure. After reading this hopefully you better understand how a vote in support of a Biden/Harris administration is not of service to anyone who wants to see progression in the area of reduced prison populations, improved prison conditions, an end to prison slavery or any of the other demands of the National Prison Strike.
My vote for Libertarian Dr. Jo Jorgensen is a vote in support of a candidate who is committed to pardoning the sentences everyone convicted of nonviolent victimless crimes and ending the failed war on drugs. Her platform responds to the question of reducing overcrowding and creating other pathways for correction as well as addressing the question of poverty crimes. The televised debates should never be our only source of information, especially seeing how corporate media are completely suppressing the third party ticket. It’s essential that voters take some time to learn more about Jorgensen’s stances on criminal justice reform and poverty, as well as the other candidates prior to casting their ballot by November 3, 2020.
